Monsters
by srslypau
Summary: Sarah tries to find a way to make her moral compass work. Sarah-centric with mentions of Bryce/Sarah and Chuck/Sarah.


**Monsters**

Morality – she believes – is relative.

There's no good or bad, no right or wrong, unless you're comparing it to something. You pick your point of reference, and go from there. Moral compasses can be tweaked. _Should _be tweaked. Absolutes have always made her uncomfortable.

She knows what she's talking about. She was rationalizing the dubious morality behind helping her father steal before she could even read the words in the bills they took home after each job. But it was her life, the only one she'd ever known. Helping your daddy is good, that was her reference, and she went from there. The people that knocked on her door asking about him were bad, and the people who helped them out were good.

And then things began to change.

Her classmates played cops and robbers and they all wanted to be cops, because they were the good guys. She wanted to tell them the truth. Let them know they'd been lied to. Cops weren't the good guys. They threatened to put perfectly nice people like her daddy in jail. And robbers weren't monsters. They didn't use guns – those were the robbers on tv, but tv was a bunch of lies anyway, with family dinners and fathers who worked at an office and presents on Christmas morning – and they didn't hurt people. They just took the money to put food on the table. Just like her daddy.

But she knew better than to tell them the truth. She couldn't trust them, because she'd been taught she could only trust one person, and that was her dad. At some point keeping the secret became more a matter of embarrassment than one of trust, but the result was pretty much the same, so she didn't feel the need to change it. She learned that stealing was bad – worse than having a real job, but still better than killing people, so her moral compass only needed a small tweak to go on – and she learned to live with that knowledge.

By the time she started high school, she'd been told more than once that she was weird. And she accepted that, because the truth was she was different than most people around her. From their point of view, Jenny Burton was a weirdo. In a high school where most kids' part-time jobs included illegal activities instead of flipping burgers and washing cars, they would've been the weird ones. It's all relative, if you think about it.

It took her father getting arrested for her moral compass to spin out of control and make her lose her balance.

Her father didn't deserve to be locked up, so the cops that took him were the bad guys. Then again, it was a cop – a CIA agent, it made no difference at that point – who gave her a chance at a new life. She'd save people, he said. Make a difference. Become Sarah Walker. What he offered seemed better than trying to make it on her own with the money her father had left her. Worse than her old life, but better than the one she'd probably lead if she took the money and run. She chose to accept his offer as a good one.

It didn't take long for her to adapt to being Sarah Walker. She wasn't weird. She was brilliant, according to her instructors. Showed incredible promise. Had what it took to be one of the best. One of the best what she couldn't tell, but she took it as a compliment anyway. She learned more languages than she ever thought possible. Mastered a number of fighting techniques. Skipped the classes on remaining detached from everyone because it was clear early on that she already knew all there was to know about that.

They made it clear to her that she was one of the good guys. She'd have to steal and lie and sometimes kill, but she'd be doing it for the right reasons. So she accepted that as truth. The CIA were the good people. The reasons they gave her – we need the intel, she's a threat to our mission, they know too much – were the right ones. Stealing, lying and killing didn't make her a monster. She had a new reference, and she went from there. CIA, good. Everyone else, bad.

And then there was Bryce Larkin.

There was something about him. It took her months to be able to pinpoint it as honesty. She wasn't used to dealing with that. There were no tales of screwed-up morals in his past. No convicts in his family tree. No difficulties in telling right from wrong.

"It's not about killing the bad guys." He told her once, when she was packing her knives. "It's not about who we kill. It's about who we save. That's what makes us different from the monsters we fight."

She pretended to understand.

It was easy to see herself as a good person when she was with Bryce. She broke the Carnal Rule – she figured it was better than going rogue, so it wasn't a terrible thing – and fell in love with him, and everything changed, once again. She killed for him. She'd have died for him. Bryce was good. What they had was good. That was her reference. Another tweak to her moral compass. Her father wasn't the only person she could trust, after all.

And then they killed him. They killed him, and then they forced her to work with the man who'd pulled the trigger. If Bryce was good, then Major Casey was someone who deserved to be killed. If the CIA were the good guys, then Major Casey and the NSA were now her allies. She decided it was easier to believe she was still one of the good guys, and she accepted her mission and her partner and her asset and her new life in Burbank.

Burbank. That's what changed everything.

For the first time in her life, she was getting to know normal people. As in, the kind of people who aren't considered weirdos in most situations. They'd have thought Jenny Burton was weird, and they'd have been weird if surrounded by people like her. But she wasn't Jenny anymore, and Sarah Walker had been trained in the arts of blending in. Nobody thought she was different from them. Just a girl working at the Wienerlicious and falling in love with a guy. Normal.

But with being normal came doing normal things. Like dinners and friendly gatherings and making small talk. Getting to know people. People who said their name was Anna or Morgan or Chuck or Ellie and she didn't have to wonder what their real names were. People who made sudden movements and she never had to worry about a gun appearing in their hands. Just people. And that's when she began to see herself through their eyes.

She listened when Ellie and Devon talked about helping someone who'd been rolled into the ER with a gunshot wound to their chest. Ellie would get misty eyed sometimes and Devon would tighten his jaw and they'd both agree on the shooter having been nothing short of a monster. She looked at Chuck's face when he saw her and Casey in the middle of a fight. She listened to Morgan's rendition of Bryce's history as the worst friend Chuck had ever had.

Bryce hadn't been perfect. Killing was killing, no matter the reason behind it. Her flawless technique when fighting was terrifying.

One year into her mission, she couldn't tell the difference between herself and one of the bad guys.

She looked around her and tried to find something she could use as a reference to tell right from wrong. Something in her life that was unarguably good. And she could only come up with one thing: Chuck. He was a good man. His friends and family were good people. As long as she kept them safe, she'd be doing the right thing. She could be nothing short of a monster, working with people with a conscience as screwed up as her own and fighting people just like her. But she was doing the right thing. She was keeping good people safe.

She finally understood what Bryce was talking about.

Somewhere along the way, she broke the Carnal Rule once again. She fell in love with Chuck. He didn't understand her and he had no idea what he was talking about most of the time, but somehow it happened, and she wasn't sure she wanted to put an end to it. It felt right. Right enough for her to forget everything else and run away with him, going against her orders. Right enough to plan it again weeks later, and then realize he was one of them.

He chose being a spy. He knew he was hurting her – he may not have been a spy just yet, but he was far from an idiot and she was sure he knew – but he did it anyway. For her, for Ellie, for his father, even for Bryce, for whatever reason. He managed to convince himself that hurting someone he loved was the lesser of two evils. He was a spy before he even started his training.

And now, here she is. Trying to keep the inevitable from happening. Trying to preserve what's left of the good man and prevent the spy from taking over. He gets closer every day. His eyes look a little harder, his voice less shaky, his flashes steadier. He's mastered the art of lying and barely hesitates before hurting someone – an asset, Morgan, whoever it takes – for the greater good. He'll kill, eventually. He'll become one of them. A monster.

She's not sure she'll be able to live with herself if she can't protect the good man from that.


End file.
